Woolf In Chic Clothing

BOOKS

December 6, 1998|By JOCELYN McCLURG and The Hartford Courant

THE HOURS. Michael Cunningham. Farrar, Straus, Giroux. $22. 226 pp.

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not Michael Cunningham, who pays homage to the great feminist novelist in his exhilarating new novel, The Hours, a brilliant literary exercise in which he updates Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway to the 1990s. You don't have to be a Woolf devotee to be enraptured by Cunningham's paean to his English idol, but the careful reader of Mrs. Dalloway (and the obsessive student of Woolf's life) will fully appreciate the depths of Cunningham's cleverness.

A more pressing concern for the average reader: Has Cunningham (Flesh and Blood) created an original work of art? Is The Hours something borrowed or something new? It's a little bit of both, but that doesn't take away from Cunningham's own inventiveness and ability to move the reader with his insights into life's crushing disappointments and small moments of happiness.

The Hours (the original title of Mrs. Dalloway) is a triptych that tells the interrelated stories of three women, "Mrs. Woolf," "Mrs. Brown" and "Mrs. Dalloway," in alternating chapters.

Mrs. Woolf is Virginia herself, seen through Cunningham's eyes first in 1941 as she is on her way to drown herself and then in 1923 as she is beginning to write her novel Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Brown is Laura Brown, a frustrated housewife in 1949 Los Angeles who is reading Mrs. Dalloway. And Cunningham's Clarissa Dalloway is one Clarissa Vaughan, a book editor in present-day Greenwich Village.

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (which recently made its way on film, starring Vanessa Redgrave), takes place during one day (with flashbacks to the past). Clarissa Dalloway, a slightly vain, slightly foolish but ultimately sympathetic woman in her 50s, is preparing to give a party. Woolf tells the parallel story of Septimus Warren Smith, a shellshocked World War I veteran who kills himself before the day ends.

In The Hours, Clarissa Vaughan is also giving a party for her best friend, Richard, a prize-winning poet dying of AIDS. Many years earlier, as a joke, Richard started calling Clarissa "Mrs. Dalloway," a nickname that captures her winning ordinariness and sense of optimism. Richard is the cynic. He and Clarissa were once briefly lovers, at a time when Richard pushed away his lover. Cunningham has dissected and put Mrs. Dalloway back together again in a way that makes Woolf both timeless and contemporary. AIDS is the perfect analogy to the madness of World War I (a generation of young men, doomed); the homosexuality of the principal players in Cunningham's story is a logical '90s parallel to the more repressed sexuality of both Woolf and the original Mrs. Dalloway.

Cunningham makes no false moves in his version of Mrs. Dalloway. He even manages to surprise and delight as he takes Woolf's words and plot twists and makes them his own. Even if there is a degree of gamesmanship at work, Cunningham's intent is serious. (Still, students of Mrs. Dalloway will be hopelessly smitten with the way Cunningham echoes Woolf. Sally Seton is updated to become Clarissa's lover of 18 years, Sally; Septimus, a "deranged poet, a visionary," becomes Richard, the dying poet who hears voices singing in Greek; the awful Miss Kilman of Mrs. Dalloway becomes the awful Mary Krull of The Hours.)

Cunningham brings his three stories together both at the end and at select places throughout the book, even weaving parallels from the original Mrs. Dalloway into the stories of Mrs. Brown and his fictional Mrs. Woolf.

The Hours is more than a lark; it's the work of a talented writer taking an adventurous plunge below the obvious surface of things. The Hours has the heft of flesh and blood, the subtlety of art.